The Gramophone Awards 2011 are underway! October 6 may seem a long way off but there’s hours and hours of listening to undertake over the next two months. Round 1 is complete and an initial list of some 646 recordings has been subdivided into 15 categories and specialist committees have reduced that long list to just six per category.

This year we’ve retired the Historic Reissue (a category that was for recordings, made pre-1961, returning to the catalogue): the tidal wave of complete editions in boxes the size of breeze blocks not only made the listening process ridiculously drawn-out, but the logistics of dealing with sets of 50-plus CDs has become more athletic then artistic: so the focus of the sole remaining Historic category will be ‘new’ old recordings – in other words archive recordings over 25 years old receiving their first commercial release (and with radio archives throwing open their doors, there are some pretty staggering treasures to be enjoyed). 

The listening copies are flooding in from the companies (hats off to the efficiency of the Hyperion and EMI warehouses for being first to arrive!) and they’re then boxed up and despatched to all the critics who have opted in to a particular category. Boxes of CDs are hurtling through the UK postal system as well as onto planes heading for Singapore, Portugal and the US.

Meanwhile, there are shortlists to be compiled for Artist of the Year (a public vote, so Gramophone’s readers can celebrate an artist who has made a particular impression these past 12 months), Young Artist (someone under 30 – and there are some string contenders) and much deliberation to be done over who should be honoured for Lifetime Achievement.

Part of the fun at this stage of the Awards here at Gramophone Towers is working our way through the contending discs and trying to second-guess the jurors. First off the shelves and into the CD player is a recording plucked from the Orchestral shortlist, a Virgin Classics disc of Bizet’s Symphony in C coupled with Roma and the Petite Suite for orchestra which finds Paavo Järvi at the helm of his new orchestra, the Orchestre de Paris (like all the Järvi clan Paavo is something of an orchestra ‘collector’ – by my reckoning this is his third concurrent orchestral position). Why not have a listen yourself and form a view ahead of our judges? (CD at Amazon / Download from Amazon)

The benchmark for the Symphony in C is the utterly gorgeous Charles Munch/RPO recording made for Reader’s Digest by RCA (CD at Amazon) and which has popped up on various labels (I have the Chesky disc, but it’s also been on Quintessence). The Munch disc, which was engineered by Kenneth Wilkinson and which still sounds stunning for a its nearly 50 years, is one of the classics of the gramophone: fleet of foot (very fleet of foot) and just exuding joie de vivre. Paavo takes the finale at quite a lick, and his Paris orchestra plays with great style – I look forward to putting them side by side.